A virtual hash page table (VHPT) may provide a mapping of physical to virtual addresses. VHPTs may not be infinitely large because as the size of the VHPT increases, overhead required for accessing entries within the VHPT also increases. Additionally, because VHPTs may be smaller than virtual address spaces, two unrelated virtual addresses may be accessed by the same key, resulting in a collision.
Processor architectures may support several hardware features that may allow an operating system (OS) implementer or virtual machine a wide range of flexibility in implementing OS policies. For example, processor architectures may support a large number of page sizes (e.g., 4 KB to 4 GB) and/or multiple page table formats, which may include, e.g., short format virtually-mapped linear page tables and long format VHPTs.